FAIRYTALE THERAPY AS AN EFFECTIVE METHOD OF WORKING A PSYCHOTHERAPIST WITH CHILDREN

Abstract

One of the modern tendencies of the development of psychological research is scientists’ pursuit to provide practical psychologists with tool replenishment in the form of techniques, which give an opportunity to carry out psychodiagnosis and correct subject’s inner issues effectively. Traumatic situations in the families and in child care institutions cause negative children’s emotional experiences and often lead to emerging of fears and phobias. Efficiency of applying art in the context of psychological help is based on the opportunity to carry out experiments with emotions and feelings, as well as to investigate and express such notions symbolically.
This article aims to find out theoretically specific features of psychotherapist work with children in the process of using fairy-tale therapy and to determine fairy-tale’s mode of application as a tool of psychotherapeutic help.
Methods: theoretical and methodological analysis of fairy-tale therapy method, summary of conceptual approaches to the ways of storytelling therapist work.
After the analysis of different researchers’ approaches in psychotherapeutic work of fairy-tale therapist, it was possible to determine the such basic ways of psychodiagnosis and corrective work with the help of fairy tales as:
1. To tell a child a fairy tale and observe child’s reactions to it, which is achieved by numerous repeats and flat voice, using vivid speech figures and peculiar proverbs and endings.
2. To ask a child to tell his/her favourite fairy tale or one which he/she remembers the most. Fairy tales which become entrenched in long-term memory are the fruit of parental message and can constitute the basis of life scripts.
3. To ask a child to invent and to tell a fairy tale. It is necessary not only to observe child’s reactions, but also to conduct an analysis of a final result of a child’s creative work – a fairy tale that can be defined as a piece of art, author of which combines images not by mistake.
4. Psychologist tells a child metaphorical problematic situation in a form of a fairy-tale story that ends with a question to which a child should answer.
Metaphorical description is not always identical to the information it represents. Transferred information is structured by a scheme that is imposed by an image, or in other words, metaphor emphasizes only some aspects of psychotherapeutic information, negating at the same time the other ones that are not of a less importance. This aspect can be eliminated in case of a use of several metaphors. Therefore, psychotherapeutic information emerges in front of someone you talk to as a multidimensional figure – in different projections, from different points of view.
Fairy-tale therapy constitutes an educational system, which is aimed to pass on the life experience, represents the way of interaction with inner self and therapy with special a fairy tale environment. Fairy-tale therapy as a method does not have age limitations for applying. Child’s storytelling provides grounds for a psychologist for the analysis, indicates necessary actions, and aims at preventing or mitigating the obstacles in the process of such therapy. Thus, the main purpose of psychodiagnosis with the help of fairytale therapy is to find out individual deviations in the development of a child for the appropriate selection of corrective tools and tasks statements